Suicide or murder? Kerala nun's death in spotlight again
Apr 13, 2007 - 4:14:57 PM
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The CBI came under a cloud when its official Varghese P. Thomas, who began investigating the case, suddenly quit in 1993 saying that he was under duress from authorities to close the case as a suicide.
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By IANS,
[RxPG] Thiruvananthapuram, April 13 - The dramatic death of a Kerala nun 15 years ago has come centrestage again with Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan asking for a detailed report from the chemical examiner who had worked on the case.
Balakrishnan's directive to chief chemical examiner R. Geetha on Thursday came after a newspaper revealed that the laboratory report on 21-year-old Abhaya, who was found dead in a well in a convent on March 27, 1992, had been tampered with.
Abhaya, who was an inmate of the Pious X convent hostel near Kottayam, was said to have committed suicide. But the newspaper report says that the chemical examiner's laboratory manuscript report had been erased and then rewritten, suggesting that she had been raped and murdered.
Though the results of the vaginal swab were positive for semen and spermatozoa, they were reportedly corrected using a whitener and rewritten as negative in the manuscript.
R. Geetha, who had done the chemical examination in 1992 and is now chief chemical examiner, admits there were some corrections but it was not under anybody's influence.
Asking the home minister to investigate how the laboratory report found its way to the newspaper office, she said a former colleague miffed with her was behind it all.
'I haven't succumbed to any pressures in my career,' she said.
The case is being re-investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation - after an order by the Ernakulam Chief Judicial Magistrate P.D. Sarangadharan in April last year.
The case was initially dismissed as suicide by the local police. It was handed over to the CBI in April 1993 after a local action committee was formed and approached the court seeking a central investigation.
The CBI concluded the case in November 1996 that the death was a homicide but 'the case remained untraced'.
However, the Ernakulam chief judicial magistrate did not accept the final report of the CBI and directed it to conduct a fresh investigation.
The CBI came under a cloud when its official Varghese P. Thomas, who began investigating the case, suddenly quit in 1993 saying that he was under duress from authorities to close the case as a suicide.
Thomas now says he regrets not going into the details of the laboratory records.'I am still certain that this was a murder. I believe that some 'influential' people had influenced the local police and the CBI to close the case as a suicide.'
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